How conservatives out-

intellectualized
progressives

Damon Linker
 Illustration | Montagu Images / Alamy Stock Photo

December 6, 2016
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The vital center is imploding throughout the Western world.

Liberal norms and institutions face a greater challenge than
at any time since the end of the Second World War. And so
defenders of the liberal order seek, often desperately, to
remind themselves of what principles they stand for and the
premises that underlie their deepest political and moral
convictions.

That's what I take Molly Worthen to be doing in her recent,

admirable essay in The New York Times. Worthen writes as a
liberal who admires the way the American right has built an
infrastructure of programs and institutes where young
conservatives receive instruction in the history of political
philosophy from Aristotle and Xenophon on down to James
Madison, Adam Smith, and beyond.

Worthen thinks liberals should do something similar:

Liberals have their own activist workshops and reading

groups, but these rarely instruct students in an intellectual
tradition, a centuries-long canon [Great Books] are powerful
tools for preparing the next generation of activists to succeed
in the bewildering ideological landscape of the country that
just elected Mr. Trump. [The New York Times]
Indeed. So why don't liberals follow the lead of their
conservative counterparts in reading classic texts?

Though Worthen never says so explicitly, the germ of an

explanation can be found in her essay when she writes,
somewhat defensively, that liberals "can't afford to dismiss
Great Books as tools of white supremacy." And why would
they be tempted to do that? Because most so-called liberals
today aren't liberals at all. They're progressives and
progressivism is an ideology that has little if any interest in
learning from the greatest books, ideas, and thinkers of the
past. And that's because, as the name implies, progressivism
is a theory of historical progress. It doesn't see itself as an
ideological project with premises and goals that had to be
established against alternative views. Rather, at any given
moment it identifies itself with empiricism, pragmatism, and
the supposedly neutral, incontestable examination of facts
and data, which it marshals for the sake of building a future
that is always self-evidently superior (in a moral sense) to
everything that came before.